stranger
by xoVanilla-Bean
Summary: Sometimes you have to kill the bad parts of you to keep them from coming back. The hard part is, you have to make sure they're the right ones. —Booker, Comstock


a/n; this part of the game was incredibly intense and chilling, so i had to coin in something about it. also, all the dialogue is from the game, and obviously not mine.

**..::stranger**

* * *

Comstock isn't afraid, not as he stares down at the water in the fountain. He knows Booker will run through the door to his cabin, following behind Elizabeth. She will undoubtedly ask questions, search for excuses to forgive him, to fall into his embrace with understanding and love. She will do this, because she's been raised into a godly creature, a beautiful thing born with a beautiful image, watched and tested with critical eyes, seen by her power with righteousness flooding her veins.

He coughs, ribs constricting inside of him. He feels death's grip in his stomach, and he knows his time is short. But he is not afraid, because Elizabeth—he's seen the statues of her, has witnessed what could be and what will be, a choker on her neck and the hope erased from her eyes—but still beautiful. The beautiful things outweigh the bad things, and the bad things vanish in the shadows of greatness. And who can object greatness? Who can object the greatness inside someone who has shown it repeatedly, again and again?

It's why he's become who he was supposed to be. He's a leader, here. He has purpose. This is where his life has led him, and he will fulfill God's grace, preaching to others that there is a being that will always love you and forgive you, who will let your sins wash away and renew yourself, if you are worthy enough. If you are meant for better things.

He is only human—but he's long looked over his humanity. His anger, his temper, his gluttony for perfecting the world with his vision and correcting the things that shouldn't ever occur. The building blocks of man are fabricated with sin, and if you wash them with golden love and renewal, who is to say you don't have a gilded border surrounding your soul forever?

He used to believe that was the closest to immortality a man could strive for. But in an infinite amount of worlds and choices and universes, he knows this to be false.

He hears their footsteps—the lightness of Elizabeth, and the hard stomps of Booker DeWitt. He stares at the water surrounding the stone of the fountain, its grip on the rock the only thing from keeping the water overflowing.

In one world out of a million, billion, trillion, it doesn't matter.

It is finished. He is not afraid.

* * *

Old Comstock speaks in tones of unfurled patience. He reeks of self-proclaimed grandeur. If Booker squints, he can see callouses on Comstock's knuckles from building the statues of himself.

"Come here, child," he says. "Well come on, I don't bite." He smiles as he looks at her, telling her how she's grown, as if he hasn't looked upon her since she was a darling babe in her crib.

"Tell me. What am I?"

Comstock grasps her hand, and Booker almost can't contain himself.

"Let her go."

Then he tells her she's a mess. He wipes her hand with a sponge from the water.

"I did everything I could to keep you safe," he says.

Booker feels the uncontrollable heat. Looking at Comstock so closely, he can see nothing else but a liar, a murderer, and a man unworthy of life. His grip tightens on the weapon in his hand, but he doesn't mean to use it.

The words Comstock relates are a jumble of nothing.

"The seed of the Prophet shall sit the throne, and drown in flame the mountains of man…"

Words that mean nothing.

"Beware Prophet. Beware the False Shepherd."

Booker's arms begin to shake.

"…for he shall be as a wall between her and destiny. DeWitt, I've been a fool. I've sent mighty armies to stop you. I've rained fire on you from above. I did all of that to keep you from her, when all I needed was to tell her the truth."

Booker feels a phantom clench his stomach, maybe his heart. _Fear_, he realizes. _But fear of what_? His head spins, in rage or confusion or manic nausea, he's not sure.

Comstock comes around to Elizabeth, saying, "Ask him, child. Ask him what happened to your finger." He grasps her wrist in his claw. "Ask DeWitt."

"_Let go of me_."

The wretched acid of bile ascends his throat, burning in a hate so rapid, the phantom fear that clenches inside his belly dissolves into a scattered state of mind. It screams out of his mouth in a torment of words, shouts, the terrible wrath that has been building and building with all the bricks of blood that he's spilt on the marbled streets of this world, and the one before.

His hands are free of any weapon but his darkened soul, and he digs his fingers into Comstock's neck.

"She's your daughter, you son of a bitch! And you abandoned her!" Booker pounds his head into the ring of the fountain. "Was it worth it? Huh? Did you get what you wanted? Tell me! _Tell me_!"

Comstock's skull bashes into the fountain, again, punctuating each end of Booker's fury._ Did you get what you wanted?_

His words echo again and again inside his skull, and he can't—he can't see past the fog and the red and Comstock's peculiar, clear, maddening eyes.

_Was it worth it?_

"Booker!"

Then the eyes falter, the lids falling, then rising half-way. The man goes limp, slowly, slowly.

"It is finished."

The man has the gall to start dying, so easily, after such a whirling pursuit.

But it's not finished.

"Nothing is finished!" Booker shoves Comstock's face into the holy water of the fountain, to choke on his last breaths, because it can't cleanse him, it can't—a fucking dip in water can't change a person, can't make you worth any more than you are, can't do a_ thing_.

"Booker, stop it!"

"You lock her up her whole life." His eyes burn. "You cut off her finger, and you put it on _me_!" His fingers suction to the back of his skull, and they stay there for a ponderous moment, then two, and everything is still—so still, except for his lungs and the thunderous beating of his heart.

"You killed him," she says, her voice a tremulous whisper, and her hands upon her mouth as if the words she said aren't real. But Elizabeth is not a child, like Comstock's words kept saying. Her eyes cut through him like a saw, serrating his joints and the sockets of his bones. "What did he mean? Huh? You tell me. What did he mean about my finger?"

Everything about the way she speaks drips with accusation.

"I don't know," he hears himself say. "I…I just assumed you were born with it. I don't know."

I don't know, I don't know, _I don't know._

Her glare falls to the middle of his face. "Your nose…" she says, eyes dulling like her voice. "It's bleeding."

He swears that he doesn't have a clue, he doesn't know, he has no idea what the old man was saying because it was blather and nonsense and nothing. More lies. More disgusting froth from a man made from scum.

"You do. You just can't remember it."

She looks down, like she can't take his face, like she sees something there that he can't.

He can't handle that. The sudden mistrust and the sudden hollowness, like he isn't a full man. Like something is gone from him, a part of him, ripped from him and out of him.

"No. I'll prove it to you. We'll destroy the siphon," he says, almost pleads. It's half for himself as it is for her. "The answer's behind one of your doors, you just have to open it."

The fear creeps in on him again, though he's not sure it ever left. _What door will she open?_ he wonders. _And what will the answer be?_

She nearly runs from the room once their destination is set, eyes never straying back to her father. But Booker has to look back, just once, and a chill falls on his neck, though it's hot and misty, like a wet puff of breath.

It is not finished. He is afraid.


End file.
